Avoid These Mistakes with Your Website
The Web is the best way to attract new customers at the lowest cost. Why? - Traditional methods of advertising and marketing appeal to a small and shrinking base of customers. Who breaks out the phone book to find a local business? Not too many people. Who responds well to getting that call about services that you are selling? In a best case scenario – it’s 10% or less. The key is being able to be FOUND when your likely prospects need you. The key to this visibility is to be friendly with the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.
Search Engines – Are they your friends or your paid entourage? You can approach it two ways. You can give the companies money through advertising and they will position your ads in front of the right searchers. Or you can provide them with value through content that they can use. If you want to control your budget and build higher value traffic, good content is the key. Here are some things to avoid when putting together content.
Don’t Use Lots of Pictures, Few Words
While pictures are helpful to make your site easy to look at, they do almost nothing to get traffic to your site in the first place. It is a balance between pretty and useful. Search engines work on words and phrases, not pictures. Focus on your written message and then add the appropriate graphic elements. The graphics are necessary – no one likes a bland website. More important than the look is the message. Avoid using pictures of logo and text where you could easily substitute searchable elements.
Stop thinking in your own terms, and start thinking of your customer
I’ve learned this from experience. It’s easy for you to describe your business in exact terms. You know exactly who you are and what you do. In many cases, that isn’t what matters to people who are searching the internet. They are trying to solve some problem that they have. Does your website have answers to problems? Of course it does. Every product is an answer to some sort of problem or need. If you had the same problem as your prospects, how would you search for your answer? When you answer that question you have some ideas for content that matters.
Don’t Hide the Details
Disclosure builds trust. If you are a vendor that has nothing to hide, then you are someone who can build trust with just words. Do you have some problems that you’ve encountered and overcome? Maybe you want to share that story. Can you give approximate pricing for your products? Do it! It’s both a good trust builder and a qualifier. If you have a $100 widget and the customer is looking for a $10 widget, do you want to spend your time convincing them otherwise? On to the next!
Avoid Never Changing Content
Once you are done with your site, you are NOT done. It’s a start and you need to continually enhance the content that you provide. Some folks will tell you that you are doing this to be interesting to customers that may return. I’m sure that is true in some businesses. My primary goal with fresh content is to entice the search engines to regularly scan my site. They make their living on knowing what is out there and it’s to your benefit to change it enough so that they care enough to visit your site with regularity.
Do Not Wait until it is Perfect
We’re not talking about building fine watches or nuclear reactors. It’s a website. If you happen to slip up and use some improper grammar or some awkward phrasing chances are that people are not going to die. Get your content to the point that it delivers your message and then move to the next. Go from a concept to execution to review to tweaking, then repeat the process. Content on the web is like money in an interest-bearing account. The content that you have out there today is found and indexed by the search engines and other sites. You will build credibility based on how long your content has been online as well.
To summarize: Your website is key to getting new prospects to look your way. Apply some strategy to the process and get good results. Do it now, as the longer you fish the more chance you have to catch some fish.
